Google Cloud Platform Comes of Age With Solid Enterprise Capabilities

Last week at the Cloud Next event, the annual user conference for developers and customers, Google’s leadership team articulated the vision and the roadmap for its cloud business. With over 10,000 attendees, the event resembled Google I/O – the most popular developer conference hosted by Google.

Having gone through a major branding exercise that consolidated Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and G-Suite under Google Cloud, the company wanted to send a strong message that it is serious about the cloud.

Google was successful in establishing itself as a credible player in the cloud market. Google’s top executives didn’t miss the opportunity to pitch its cloud platform to enterprises. Though Amazon and Microsoft are ahead of the game, it is using some of its core strengths to deliver a differentiated platform to customers.

Here are the key takeaways from Google Cloud Next 2017.

Increased investments in infrastructure

Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt announced that they invested over $30 billion in building the cloud infrastructure. He referred to Snap as a customer that’s betting its business on Google Cloud Platform. Snap, which went public recently, is committed to spending $2 billion on GCP.

Google is ambitious in expanding its global footprint across Americas, Europe, and Asia. While California, Montreal, and Netherlands became immediately available to customers, many new regions including Singapore, Mumbai, Sydney, and London are expected to go live this year. Google’s Cloud will have over 15 regions and 30 zones before the end of this year. The company claims that customers run their workloads on the same infrastructure that allows Google to return billions of search results in milliseconds, serve 6 billion hours of YouTube video per month and provide storage for 1 Billion Gmail users.

Janakiram MSV heads the Cloud Infrastructure Services at Aditi Technologies. He was the founder and CTO of Get Cloud Ready Consulting, a niche Cloud Migration and Cloud Operations firm that recently got acquired by Aditi Technologies. In his current role, he leads a highly talented engineering team that focuses on migrating and managing applications deployed on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Windows Azure Infrastructure Services.
Janakiram is an industry analyst with deep understanding of Cloud services. Through his speaking, writing and analysis, he helps businesses take advantage of the emerging technologies. He leverages his experience of engaging with the industry in developing informative and practical research, analysis and authoritative content to inform, influence and guide decision makers. He analyzes market trends, new products / features, announcements, industry happenings and the impact of executive transitions.
Janakiram is one of the first few Microsoft Certified Professionals on Windows Azure in India. Demystifying The Cloud, an eBook authored by Janakiram is downloaded more than 100,000 times within the first few months. He is the Chief Editor of a popular portal on Cloud called www.CloudStory.in that covers the latest trends in Cloud Computing. Janakiram is an analyst with the GigaOM Pro analyst network where he analyzes the Cloud Services landscape. He is a guest faculty at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H) where he teaches Big Data and Cloud Computing to students enrolled for the Masters course. As a passionate speaker, he has chaired the Cloud Computing track at premier events in India.
He has been the keynote speaker at many premier conferences, and his seminars are attended by thousands of architects, developers and IT professionals. His sessions are rated among the best in every conference he participates.
Janakiram has worked at the world-class product companies including Microsoft Corporation, Amazon Web Services and Alcatel-Lucent. Joining as the first employee of Amazon Web Services in India, he was the AWS Technology Evangelist. Prior to that, Janakiram spent 10 years at Microsoft Corporation where he was involved in selling, marketing and evangelizing the Microsoft Application Platform and Tools.